April 4, 2013

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore. Carson responded to that adulation by regularly giving his time to talk to young people, who needed to know that there was so much more beyond the streets.

I was one of those young people. I don’t doubt that Carson was a conservative even then. I knew plenty of black people who loved their community and hated welfare. But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.

The use of the word "mask" here is inflammatory, and it will bring traffic to this NYT op-ed, but I think it's a big distraction from the point Coates is trying to make.

He's the author of the great New York Deli Racism outrage, which turned out, upon closer inspection, to be nothing at all.

Coates is a huckster who sees a white racist under every bed. The colleges and the press love this bullshit, so what can you expect?

We've got a phalanx of black hucksters who make their living unearthing ever more arcane outrages over white racism. Their livelihood depends on it. The racism huckstering is just another form of welfare for blacks. The liberal community is always eager to pay blacks to bitch about racism.

So, how are we supposed to set aside our "racist" tendency to see blacks as welfare hucksters when so many of them are so proud of their welfare, racism huckstering? Like Coates.

When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House.

Wrong argument. Lefties were not calling for any Black Democrats to run for president either otherwise Jesse Jackson or somebody like him would have been president by now. They were busy hoodwinking Blacks for votes then. Maybe that is what made Ben Carson reject the Dems then because he saw through them.

Well we all have a faceThat we hide away foreverAnd we take them out andShow ourselvesWhen everyone has goneSome are satin some are steelSome are silk and some are leatherThey're the faces of the strangerBut we love to try them on

Well we all fall in loveBut we disregard the dangerThough we share so many secretsThere are some we never tellWhy were you so surprisedThat you never saw the strangerDid you ever let your lover seeThe stranger in yourself?

Don't be afraid to try againEveryone goes southEvery now and thenYou've done it, why can'tSomeone else?You should know by nowYou've been there yourself

Once I used to believeI was such a great romancerThen I came home to a womanThat I could not recognizeWhen I pressed her for a reasonShe refused to even answerIt was then I felt the strangerKick me right between the eyes

Well we all fall in loveBut we disregard the dangerThough we share so many secretsThere are some we never tellWhy were you so surprisedThat you never saw the strangerDid you ever let your lover seeThe stranger in yourself?

Don't be afraid to try againEveryone goes southEvery now and thenYou've done it why can'tSomeone else?You should know by nowYou've been there yourself

You may never understandHow the stranger is inspiredBut he isn't always evilAnd he is not always wrongThough you drown in good intentionsYou will never quench the fireYou'll give in to your desireWhen the stranger comes along.

Interesting that, with Carson having been in the news seemingly about every other day since the great speech debacle (you know, the one he couldn't have written himself...), Ann chooses this particular snippet to focus on.

When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House.

True, but only because at that time Carson was politically unknown. But there were plenty of people calling on Colin Powell to run back in 2000. He declined. I don't know if he would have gotten the nomination had he tried, but he certainly would have had a good shot.

Did Steel call himself a 'hip hop republican' or does that come from Coates?

His rise began with a meandering speech that mixed policy, humor and victimization in February at the National Prayer Breakfast

What a shock that conservatives might only notice a man when he speaks at the national prayer breakfast instead of to small groups like Coates 20 years ago. That clearly makes their interest inauthentic.

How on earth can someone say they have no doubt Carson was conservative even then, yet conclude with the accusation that Carson put on a mask [in order to be noticed and loved by the pinktones, of course].

Either the man was conservative (or classically liberal) then or he wasn't. If he was then he's not wearing a mask now, is he?

Besides. I thought people were supposed to grow, evolve, mature, change...or is that only when "republicans" turn on the party and act like raving libtards (see Powell, Colon (sic).

Republicans made a HUGE mistake in the 1960s by allowing Civil Rights to be coupled with The Great Society welfare programs. Civil Rights could have been about Liberty, Independence, and Personal Responsibility. Instead, it became about Liberty and Dependency, and Victim-ology. Republican's mistake in this was seeing the expansion of liberty below the "rights" or powers of states -- i.e., Republicans chose States Rights over Individual's Rights. Because of this mistake, Democrats were able to co-op the civil rights argument and create a nearly permanent welfare state. It seems like Ben Carson gets this.

BUT, now we're faced with a similar civil rights challenge. As David Brooks rightly notes, when the gay movement focused on promiscuity and bathhouses, it was difficult to make civil rights progress. Today gays and lesbians are focused on forming families, marriages, and serving in the military -- all deeply virtuous and honorable institutions. Yet, we, as Republicans, we this as a threat to our culture -- once again siding against Liberty and Civil Rights. It's difficult to take Ben Carson seriously, when he is empowering the same mistake to be repeated that led to the current welfare state.

When we are challenged to not be the stupid party, thinking these issues all the way through in a deeply principled fashion is what that challenge means. The welfare state leads to a profound lack of personal responsibility, a lack of ownership in the success of our nation, and destroys any sense of personal, family, or community accountability for one's actions. Abortion, Obamacare, and our Debt are simply symptoms of a much deeper issue. Ronald Reagan said that virtue is the cornerstone of democracy and that when virtue is lost, so is the democracy. How deep or shallow we define virtue is at question today. Do we expand liberty and increase personal responsibility, ownership, and accountability. Or do we continue to be the stupid party that has shallow principles, is unable to adapt to change, and simply clings to a past that never really existed in some failed attempt to controls behaviors that seem strange to us. That's the choice and it's critical to the Republic we make good choices.

It's not hidden. Ann hates anyone superior to herself and picks at such targets in bitchy ways, unless she is compelled to acknowledge their mastery. She does not feel Obama superior to her and so is comfy with him. She was on the fence with Romney. She knows Carson is worth ten of her and lays this down. She knows where Richard Fernandez stands in comparison to her and any mention of him on this board is excised.

Surprise, surprise, surprise! Carson was not the first nor the last to speak his mind. It was pretty shameless of Althouse to denigrate Carson like that just two months ago. Are we seeing evolution both our eyes?

Republicans made a HUGE mistake in the 1960s by allowing Civil Rights to be coupled with The Great Society welfare programs. Civil Rights could have been about Liberty, Independence, and Personal Responsibility. Instead, it became about Liberty and Dependency, and Victim-ology.

I think that the victimology thing was built into the system by the Court's "self-esteem" language in Brown v. Board of Ed.

Gee, I seem to remember conservatives willing to talk about a presidential run for Powell back in the Nineties, despite his well-known social liberalism and RINOism in general. Hell, I had a Swann for Governor sign in my window in '06. Still think he would have been better than the Governor of Philadelphia. There was talk of having Rice replace the ailing and un-presidential Cheney in 2004. People like Coates were fond of accusing authors of such proposals of "tokenism" back then, if I remember correctly.

We have all these stories everyday, and if they aren't purely political, we find what is about them, and it seems that on domestic policy it all comes down to two sides that don't really change and are pretty simple:

The Right says: 1) leave people alone, 2) expect them to take care of themselves and each other 3) respect our traditions

The left says: 1) The government can solve everything with enough money and power, and we have a responsibility to make it do that. 2) Those who don't agree are seriously flawed by greed and racism.

... a distinguished neurosurgeon who went from the depths of Detroit poverty to the heights of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. But his current status among conservatives isn't so much rooted in Carson's redemptive rise from rags to respectability, as it is in the belief that he is, in the long winter of Obama, the one they've been waiting for.

So sayeth the college drop out son of a stay-at-home Black Panther father. We all have our burdens to bear, eh.

I stopped reading at that point...why bother? I'm going to be "told" what I think about a neurosurgeon? I am partial to neurosurgeons, and their teams of various races (race having nothing to do with saving lives)...one saved my better half's life 22 March 2006 when she was 15 minutes from death.

This political putz is going to tell me I am not impressed by Carson's accomplishments, which vastly overshadow Coates' own, but only like his black face potential GOP candidacy?

Mr Coates is entitled to his opinion, even when they are wrong. And I am entitled to mine. I have no need to entertain Coates.

But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House.

Revealing how Coates manages to interpret progress as a negative isn't it? It's almost like he has some sort of internal belief and interprets all evidence in furtherance of it.

I think Coates is trying to say conservatives foolishly believe Carson will change the way we talk about race in America.Or is that he'll change the way we see race in America? I can't remember all the superpowers people foolishly see in these black politicians who spring up out of nowhere to transform us.

I think I mentioned it at the time, but for the first month or so of hearing and really liking Ben Carson, I had no idea he was Black, but I liked what he was saying a lot. This blog was the first place I heard about his skin color. It wasn't mentioned at the right wing places I was reading and hearing him.

It's good for Blacks that he's Black, but otherwise I'd prefer he was a handicapped lesbian transsexual.

So sayeth the college drop out son of a stay-at-home Black Panther father. We all have our burdens to bear, eh.

You forgot the 7 kids with 4 women from the "stay at home" father.

What does stay at home father mean, do you suppose? Welfare recipient? I mean, if you're writing your official bio and your father did anything at all worth mentioning, don't you gussy it up and mention it?

Coates:Since the dawn of the Obama era, conservatives have been on the lookout for such a man. In 2004 they dispatched Alan Keyes cross-country to take up the mantle of the Conservative Black Hope and deliver an early knockout to Obama. Keyes had never lived in Illinois and his voters barely knew him, and voted accordingly. But it did not matter who he was. What mattered was their plan.

Yeah, Keyes was embarrassing, but he was nobody's first choice and nobody's Great Black Hope.He was slotted in at the last minute because Obama had already personally destroyed two opponents by having their divorce records unsealed and publicized. People were not lining up to run against the unscrupulous Obama team at that late point.

The plantation metaphor refers to a popular theory on the right. It holds that the 95 percent of African-Americans who voted for a Democratic president are not normal Americans voting their beliefs, but slaves.

Not quite. The plantation metaphor holds that liberals generally react to the appearance of a black conservative as if the entire race were their property. To equate this with believing that they're slaves would require us to hold that the liberal belief in question has a basis in reality. (Well, there's a first time for everything.)

Several comments suggest that I blame Republicans for all the ills in the world, and not Democrats. And I certainly have a bias here. I simply believe that left to their own devices, Democrats will spend the country into oblivion and seperate the nation from constitution, thus destroying liberty, in an attempt to achieve equality of results. And, in the process, assume a dictorial level of power. While I hope intelligent Democrats combat this, I don't put a lot of faith in it. I think it's possible for Republicans to get this and that's where I choose to put pressure. Good chance, this won't be effective either. I guess I just think that challenging Republicans to think deeper is about the best chance we have to get out of the mess we're in.

...but I think it's a big distraction from the point Coates is trying to make.

I take it the point Coates is trying to make is that, if you make a list of all the people who have been GOP frontrunners, or in other ways rose to some headline-grabbing prominence since President Obama was elected ( including, but not limited to: Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Steele, Gingrich, Romney, Eastman, Paul, Paul, Ryan, Rubio, Cruz, and now Carson ), then ignored all those that were not black, all the rest would be black.

The article is no different than multitudes of others of a similar bent. It may be dressed up in more readable prose, but, ultimately it is the same progressive drivel. The comments there are more of the same. Between them they reflect and prove that which they seek to disavow. Any minority whom does not hew to the progressive propaganda must be "uncle tom" or a "disgrace to his race" or some such racialist rubbish. Any impediment, indeed, every impediment faced by any minority must be the fault of white people. If the schools that you send your children to are of low quality, it's the fault of white people. If there are too many fatherless children, it's the fault of the white people. If there isn't "fill in the blank" it's the fault of the white people. None of these nitwits ever consider that taking even a little personal responsibility, making people responsible ,would alleviate many of the "slights" that they purportedly suffer from. Poor schools ? How many of your neighbors contribute to the tax funds that support those schools ? How many of your neighbors actively support their children's education at home ? Low income ? Did you bother to get an education ? Do you bother to continue your education ? Do you continue to elect people who line their pockets at your expense. None of that is the fault of anyone but yourself. If you don't like your situation fix it. Stop blaming everyone else because you won't drag your carcass off of the couch. Stop expecting that anyone else should rescue you from your own ignorance and stupidity. It's not racism or racist, it's your choice and your fault. Accept the consequences of those choices, after all, you, willingly, made them.

When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.

PHX asks why that's inflammatory. It's because he's tying in the wearing of masks to "unbroken string of white men." He's using the word "mask" in a racial way, thus subtly calling Carson an oreo. He's black on the outside (mask) but white people love all that white goodness on the inside.

I'd like to know what the point is that Althouse thinks he is trying to make. It seems to me that he is just rationalizing to convince himself that conservatives don't care about their fellow conservatives who happen to be black but just want to use them as tokens and so therefore its okay for liberals to vilify him.

From my perspective, it seems to me that we conservatives are delighted when a black person shares his conservative beliefs and we hope that he will have influence in the black community so what is wrong with that view. One advantage we conservatives have over liberals is that we know and have more contact with blacks and we know that a lot them share a lot of our values. Given that knowledge, we know that many of them shouldn't be voting for the liberal Dems based on their core values and not to forget the disaster the Dems have been to the black community the last fifty years.

"He then cast himself as a victim of political correctness, besieged by white liberals" I consider that statement to be false, its nothing more than spin. Yes, I'm sure he has always been a conservative or a long time conservative but it was only when he shared his conservative views that he did in fact become a victim of the liberals, it was actually when he took off his mask that he was subjected to liberal abuse.

I guess Coates is trying to say the GOP looks at race too much when casting about for their next great hope. But his accusation doesn't really work, because the fact is race is used *against* republicans all the time. The tea party looks so white! Both men running on the ticket last year were so white! Policies like voter ID are racist! Being against affirmative action is racist!

So it makes sense that, in a time when we nominate people for the Supreme Court because they are Wise Latinas, or make big announcements that the head of Secret Service is, for the first time ever a woman!, a party would seek to change the tally, to remove that as a talking point.

But let's not pretend its just a one sided thing. Sure, the GOP got excited about Alan West and he failed to get re-elected. But who has ever gotten excited about a national stage for Waters, or Conyers, Or Jackson-Lee? These are people constantly elected to office whom nobody attaches any hope. What does that say? It's the mirror image of the same problem.

There's a reason Democrats had to wait until a little known State Senator cleared the field and got elected to the Senate before they had themselves a big hope. It wasn't due to their deep bench of viable black candidates, although they'll use the numbers on that bench against the GOP. But Obama was the only one. I mean, they even put posters of Obama with the label Hope right on it.

So all Coates is saying is, if the GOP tries to play this game like Democrats do, I will cast aspersions on their people. And I suspect Althouse nods along, even though she was taken in by the last Mr Hope.

Carson has been called a House-nigger by many on the left. I would opine that, au contraire, Coats is the perfect example of a House-nigger on the leftist Plantation--dutifully defending his masters by attacking a major threat to Plantation life with his tortured reasoning--obviously given his previous writings, the only kind of reasoning Coats seems to know

The plantation metaphor refers to a popular theory on the right. It holds that the 95 percent of African-Americans who voted for a Democratic president are not normal Americans voting their beliefs, but slaves.

Slaves to the Democrats? Pretty much. I worked on the campaign of a moderate Republican -- a Black Republican -- back in the day and I was appalled at the reaction of the Black community. Of course nearly all of the Black vote went to his opponent, a lackluster liberal white Democrat while the "word" was put out that our candidate was an "Uncle Tom" and an "Oreo" and about ever other insult to suggest that this fine, honorable, accomplished man was nothing more than a pawn and a dupe.

Sort of the crap Ta-Nehisi is dishing out about Ben Carson.

A corollary to the plantation theory is the legend of the Conservative Black Hope...

No, the corollary to the plantation theory is the "house n*gger" theory, which is that there are people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, who are granted status out of proportion to their abilities in return for keeping track of who might be leaving the plantation and helping Massa keep them there. In the antebellum South the House n*ggers worked indoors, wore real clothes instead of the tattered rags of the field hands, and slept in the mansion -- servants quarters to be sure, but vastly better than the leaky and drafty slaves quarters the field hands slept in, so they were highly motivated to inform on the hands. Today media whores like Sharpton and Jackson have their faces on TV and Ta-Nehisi has a regular gig writing drivel for the Atlantic. But that's way better than what they'd have if they were judged by the abilities and by the content of their character instead of their willingness to say what their masters in the liberal establishment want them to say.

Does it matter that this abolitionist truth-teller serves at the leisure of an audience that is overwhelmingly white? Not really.

Republicans aren't allowed to get excited over a man who stands up and speaks truth to power? Why not? Ben Carson is very intelligent, and he surely knew the downside of what he was doing when he stood up at that prayer breakfast and spoke the self-evident truth about Obamacare. I'm sure he was aware that it would trigger the race hucksters like Ta-Nehisi coming after him to eviscerate him in print. But he did it anyway. He is what he is, and Ta-Nehisi is what he is.

Blacks are brainwashed slaves; you can’t expect them to know what’s in their interest.

Considering their support for Obama despite the consequences of Obama's economic policies on the Black community, that may be the one true thing Ta-Nehisi wrote in his entire column.

> I simply believe that left to their own devices, Democrats will spend the country into oblivion and seperate the nation from constitution, thus destroying liberty, in an attempt to achieve equality of results. And, in the process, assume a dictorial level of power. While I hope intelligent Democrats combat this, I don't put a lot of faith in it.

Okay, so let's see what you do about this.

> I guess I just think that challenging Republicans to think deeper is about the best chance we have to get out of the mess we're in.

You do know that's twaddle, right?

Repubs aren't perfect, but unless you're actually in a position to change them (and you're not), you can either support them or not.

The effects of that have nothing to do with your intentions. (Supporting a Dem because the Repub wasn't good enough is supporting a dem.)

That because no one paid attention to those black men before (none that Coates noticed, and he's free to make up whatever he wants to occupy the hearts of white men) that changing times prove something BAD?

He's just stuck on stupid, isn't he. But would he have a career if there was equality and people knew about it? He'd have to talk about something other than race. Does he know how?

Do we so completely and utterly dismiss Coates that whatever he says is just a nice black guy we can feel good about having a prominent presence that all we hear is "bwwa bwaa bwaa bwap bwap bwaa bwaa". Like Charlie Brown grown-ups.

Why does no one listen to what Coates SAYS?

Why does it take a fringe-winger to speak about clear and blatant and hateful racism when it's Coates?

I hope we're better people than that, and will defend the objects of racist slander.

In this black racialist's world Carson's history only began when he "sttod up" to BHO. He was like the 95% and bang he became consevative so he could become the darling of the right.Coates' stupid writing is just a vehicle for libs to pontificate about how desperate the repubs are.